You can't occupy an objective with a drone or a missile. You can't control a city with a drone.

Infantry and AFVs that support them will never go away. They may change but war isn't just about destruction.

Oh yes you can. Just not a flying drone and not just one.

I'm going to avoid the quippy sarcastic response and try my best to be curious:

How would you occupy a city with only drones? What would it look like? Would they issue orders to civilians to stay in their homes? What sort of objectives that humans do now in war [0] do you think drones can fully replace?

[0] establishing forward bases for further logistical support, "securing" areas, including searching through rubble for humans and making sure they're not a threat, etc. I've never been in the military so I don't know from experience but I'm pretty sure there's tons of other examples here.

But your not flying drone is going to look like a tankette, aka the autonomous combat warrior weasel from Rheinmetall.

Maybe.

There are some experiments using turret style drones to maintain like DMZs. They still need a human operator. That is a case where you are mostly just waiting though.

Seizing a town means dealing with a ton of civilians - negotiating, handling mixed reports, etc. Drones may become part of that but cameras are imperfect and you will need people unless Drone tech has a giant leap in human interfacing.

> Just not a flying drone and not just one.

Half-life 2 confirmed.

I'd be fine with stepping in an m1 Abrams equipped with trophy [0] which

"Since 2011, the system has achieved 100% success in all low and high-intensity combat events, in diversified terrain (urban, open and foliage). The system has intercepted a variety of threats, including the 9M133 Kornet ATGM, RPG-29, etc. the U.S Army has reported similar success in tests. “I tried to kill the Abrams tank with ATGM 48 times and failed, despite the fact that some of them were supersonic,” said US Army Col. Glenn Dean."

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophy_(countermeasure)

I think the guy has a point in tanks being useful, but nobody's saying it can't be satelite controlled drone tanks.

Probably not with the current level of technology. Especially given that the lifetime of the tank is not only "drive forward and shoot" - it needs to be fueled, oiled, repaired, restocked, pulled out of the mud, etc. Fully automating this would be a very complex task. Especially achieving it on a battlefield where there are people who are present there, unlike the remote controller, and do their best to try and not let you do any of that.

Indeed. I am sure there are lots of things under development, I have little knowledge in the area but I ran across this video the other day which suggests refueling and rearming via drone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNLCa6isqJA

No idea how far between concept and reality that is and obviously this is a whole different class of vehicle than a tank.

I think that's a potentially useful idea. At this point, putting people in tanks is irresponsible. But that doesn't mean they couldn't be used as remotely-operated vehicles.

If it doesn't have to carry people, it can carry much less armor, which makes it more maneuverable; it might carry so much less mass that it doesn't need tracks to handle rough terrain. If it's light and nimble enough it doesn't need a turret to point the main weapon.

Is a remote-controlled dune buggy with a low-recoil rifle a tank?

You still need to protect the ammunition, otherwise a nearby explosion will set it off (this also happens at the moment but less so than I would expect it to happen with less armor, which also would make penetrating the wall much easier and which would make the tank a softer target altogether).

Sure, but you might not care as much because:

- you can airlift 25 2-ton dune-buggies instead of 1 50-ton tank

- you can buy 25 $2 million dune-buggies for the cost of 2 $25 million tanks

- if you sent 2 tanks, losing one is half of your force projection. If you sent 25 dune-buggies, losing one is 4% of your force.

- maintenance on an unmanned 2-ton dune-buggy has to be easier, faster and cheaper than maintenance on a tank. Tanks need dedicated recovery vehicles (or Ukrainian tractors) that cost nearly as much as another tank. Maintenance is going to be much, much easier without armor and the concomitant suspension for the armor getting in the way.

A hybrid powerplant is probably best -- a diesel motor-generator to charge batteries and run for distance, with an electric motor system and nice quiet relatively cool batteries for an hour or two of sneaking around at a time. Tanks don't sneak up on you, but a hybrid dune-buggy in battery mode can.

This also has knock-on effects for the civilian economy, because if the cool support weapon for the infantry is a quiet hybrid dune-buggy, the same thing with a crew cabin instead of a gun and ammo will be a smash hit.

The tank can carry a bigger gun, but that's about it. Most of it is armor that it has to haul for 100-300 miles at a time (before it runs out of fuel).

Also, lol at "Ukrainian tractors". Their biggest (only?) tractor plant was destroyed in Kharkiv. Most of their tractors are... John Deere. Probably why they got so good at modifying them that Americans are buying their software :D

> If it doesn't have to carry people, it can carry much less armor, which makes it more maneuverable

But it will be vulnerable to smaller weapons on smaller cheaper vehicles.

But we already know that tanks are vulnerable to relatively cheap small vehicles, so this is not a comparative disadvantage.

Also consider that tanks are dispatched in small groups; they need to be able to defend themselves. But a swarm of buggies could have weapons optimized to defend each other -- a shotgun is pretty effective against small suicide drones, and nothing defends against a laser-guided bomb anyway.

How could you figure? How would they be controlled while under communication jamming? Until autonomous AI exists we'll need people on the ground.

The same way that airplane drones are controlled, from a satelite in orbit directly above. To jam that you'd need to get yourself above the tank, which to be fair is probably doable to some extent, so there would have to be countermeasures for it. But it's not exactly impossible.

Drones fly pretty high and usually avoid contact with the enemy, and if there's trouble, they can easily flee and come back later. For on-the-ground vehicle, one need to stay much closer to the enemy, and if something goes wrong, the opportunities for fleeing are much harder to come by. You certainly don't need to physically be on top of the tank to jam - there are military systems that can disrupt communications in a wide area. And, probably, just dumping something non-transparent on whatever it uses to acquire visual information would work too. There would be nobody to come out and clean it up - a trivial task for a human, much harder for the robotic drone. Humans are very flexible, robots aren't, at least not until we get some AI going. And tbh, if we have such an AI, I'm not sure we really want to give it a tank to drive around.

Or you launch an anti-satellite missile.

Which is the reason why great-powers don't go to war with each other these days. Forget nukes, the first thing that will be destroyed is each other's satellite communication systems. That alone would devastate the world's economy.

Anti-satellite warfare is a huge reason why the Space Force (stupid name) came into existence.

That's a problem, but it's one that exists already, in that a tank crew with a broken or jammed radio is pretty much useless.

If you want to occupy territory, you've got to do that on the ground.

If Clausewitz is to be believed, killing the enemy army is priority 1, and territory only matters in pursuit of that goal.

Makes sense - if all combatants in the Russian army are dead, there’s no further need to defend territory for Ukraine. A boom with a border guard stamping passports would suffice.

"War is a continuation of policy by other means."

Political goals are always the first priority. Fighting may be exciting, but it may also be irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. Defeating the enemy is neither necessary nor sufficient for winning the war.

Right, but what if you want to chase the Russians out of Ukraine without killing the Russian army to the last man?

When it gets to that point, the russian army without supply lines will have no other means to stay engaged.

Thus the priority from the very beginning was to disrupt the supply lines and ability to generate resources, meanwhile securing own supply and resources.

Ukraine needs more supply of long range artillery and lot more ammo for it ... yesterday and right now!

A temporary solution at best. You chase them out and they’ll eventually come at you again, until they are dead or disbanded.

Tanks and soldiers are used to occupy territory, but in the face of a well-equipped enemy and/or a motivated populace, they can't hold it.

Not everybody likes wars of attrition. Russia is an outlier in that regard. Copying their doctrine and tactics is a bad idea, as is citing them as a successful example of how to accomplish anything. They are great at beating up on unarmed civilians, but against a modern armed force they wouldn't stand a chance... and no amount of tanks and soldiers will change that.

>... They are great at beating up on unarmed civilians, but against a modern armed force they wouldn't stand a chance...

...modern armed force and which is willing and allowed to fight. It's an increasingly important factor of modern day engagements.

Let's not forget the political aspects of the battlefield, as we are continuing to witness.

>, but against a modern armed force they wouldn't stand a chance.

They seem to be doing quite well against the modern army of Ukraine, NATO-trained for 7-8 years now.

The line of engagement barely moved in 3 months all the while Ukraine is hopelessly outgunned, Russians are doing quite well indeed /s. In reality UAF wasn't even a really modern army, just more modern than Russia, and all their "NATO" training in effect started in 2014.

Where do people get the impression that Russian army is strong and capable is beyond me, they just throw people into the meat grinder and sit on top of the infinite Soviet arsenal of old equipment.

A properly-sized invasion force given the physical size of Ukraine, and the size of its army, should have been 400,000-600,000 strong. Russia went in with <200,000, with its force structure badly allocated (not enough infantrymen or logistics guys), and has still managed to occupy a land area larger than Portugal + Ireland combined. And they've done that with essentially their peacetime standing forces. From the perspective of how the Russian army is "supposed" to fight (with a massive mobilization to flesh out its units), this invasion is essentially with one hand tied behind its back by improper force design/employment, and the other tied by rampant corruption. Still, Russia is beating Ukraine to death with headbutts...and also suffering a TBI in the process.

"Quantity has a quality all its own". They aren't considered "strong" because individual Russian battalions are expert warfighters per se. They're considered "strong" because the Russian military-industrial complex in its totality is not something that can be idly ignored by anyone except maybe the US or China.

Basically Russia scores high on 3 particular Principles of War: Mass, Offensive, and Simplicity. Not so well on the other 6 though.

https://www.trngcmd.marines.mil/Portals/207/Docs/TBS/B2B2269...

The impression I'm under is that the Ukraine forces have the will and the training to succeed, and maybe the manpower and intel, but not the weapons. And for some reason, we (meaning the rest of the civilized world) are dragging our feet on giving/lending them better hardware.

Frustrating to watch.

We airlifted M777 howitzers to them in the blink of an eye, by the standards of government/military bureaucracy. Meanwhile out here in the First Island Chain we've been begging for reinforcements/gear/funding for the inevitable fight with China and THAT shit is definitely being slow-walked in comparison.

There are also larger issues to consider beyond just "we want the help the Ukrainians". The best stuff we can send has a bunch of sensitive NATO/US technical information (radio comms, etc.). Do we want to risk that gear falling into Russian hands (and by extension probably getting shared with China)? If the answer is "no", we either have to send alternatives or send the equipment to depot maintenance areas to have the sensitive tech removed. That takes time.

Do we want to risk escalating the war outside of Ukraine, if the Russians respond kinetically to armaments shipments? The answer is again an emphatic "no" from almost every nation except maybe Poland.

Hence the popular snarky refrain: "NATO will fight Russia to the last drop of Ukrainian blood". Western governments and people will "stand with Ukraine" as long as it doesn't involve them really risking anything (such as themselves being on the receiving end of Russian missiles or artillery).

> Do we want to risk that gear falling into Russian hands (and by extension probably getting shared with China)?

More concerning (imo) is gear, particularly man portable anti-air weapons, sold to terrorist groups either via corruption in the Ukrainian forces, or a Russian op to supply NATO arms to such groups.

No idea if your impression is true or not. But if I was in charge of Ukrainian propaganda, I can’t think of a better story to tell allied nations so they’d donate lots of weapons

A simple reading of 1930s world history is all the "story" we should need. When a Hitler or a Putin tells you what they intend to do, believe them.

I'm not sure willingness matters as much in the military as you seem to think.

We'll see. We have an all-volunteer military here in the US, and that won't change, at this point. The idea, as always, is to get more done with fewer people.

It'll change very fast once US gets into a major war. Say, with China.

That war (god forbid) might only take a couple of hours

Unless it's a land war we're more than able to defeat China with what we've got now and their future looks very dim due to the demographic bomb they've created so that's unlikely to change.

I'm not too sure it would be motivating to people either. Usually what motivates people is the fear of being overrun by some other group but with immigration the way it is that's happening anyway.

Never say never, but you really don't want that to happen.

I didn't say anything about wanting it to happen. But if it happens, does anyone seriously believe that US could avoid re-instituting the draft?

There are a lot of voices that seem to believe that isolationism is the way to go and that this will protect their 'lifestyle' from being impacted by the war in Ukraine. It's interesting how apparently some of history's lessons are impossible to learn, the exact same thing happened in 1938 and the end result was a much bigger war.

Also, the degree to which the world economies are now interconnected make it next to impossible to believe that a major war in Europe would not impact other parts of the world, which is super naive. Time will tell but I fear that we're in for a very rough ride if this current war doesn't get stopped in its tracks before it can engulf more territories, which ultimately will happen.

The only good thing is that now that the Russians have shown their true goals that the bulk of the 'NATA did this' or 'The Ukrainians only have themselves to blame' people have something to chew on.

I'm not a fan of our (US + NATO) current Ukraine policy, but that isn't because I'm an isolationist. I think it's just dumb policy, on several different dimensions. The version of the criticism you're leveling right now can be inverted very easily. That the people arguing for escalation in Ukraine, that it's "the exact same thing [that] happened in 1938" (it isn't), and that unless we do things like a NFZ it leads to a larger war, have a cartoon version in their heads of war and geopolitical strategy. Where there's clear boundaries between the "good guys" and "bad guys", like this is some Marvel film where you don't really even need to watch it to know what happens (spoiler alert: the good guys win!). Perhaps they are the ones who have something, and some history, to chew on.

You either accept a moral responsibility to protect sovereign nations from elimination, and elimination at this point was stated by Russian officials and media as a goal numerous times, or you accept the Russian position of "lands and peoples belong to the strong men" and we're back to the age of conquest, but now with nukes. Not only the former position is morally right, but it also prevents or at least postpones the nuclear proliferation.

This is not only about Ukraine, this is about the whole Eastern Europe, and literally about post WW2 order that you seem to be enjoying the fruits of, if only by hanging out on Hacker News.

>>>You either accept a moral responsibility to protect sovereign nations from elimination

And yet we've been arming the Saudis while they starve and bomb the Yemenis into oblivion for the past 10 years.

>>>This is not only about Ukraine, this is about the whole Eastern Europe

https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Wars-are-only-evil-when-West...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/02/civili...

I find the degree to which HN has taken umbrage with this particular war.....unsurprising, yet extremely telling.

So don’t do that either. I agree there is rampant hypocrisy and that should stop too. That is not an argument against supporting Ukraine.

I don't recall the United States and Ukraine signing a mutual defense pact, or a treaty that designates the United States as the guarantor of Ukrainian independence. The former position you are advocating for literally amounts to "the United States is the Global Empire, and all changes in state arrangements must be approved by Her". That's fine, but just make that your argument. Trying to morally guilt trip people is pointless because there's at least a dozen other conflicts around the world right now where you can make the same argument, about some country's sovereignty being violated.

>This is not only about Ukraine, this is about the whole Eastern Europe, and literally about post WW2 order that you seem to be enjoying the fruits of, if only by hanging out on Hacker News.

I'm not sure what purpose you think this sentence serves. If your argument is, again, the United States is the Global Imperial Power and, because I post on HN, I am balking in my responsibility to sufficiently support this Empire, then got it. I'll make sure to "do better".

> a treaty that designates the United States as the guarantor of Ukrainian independence

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Securit...

> there's at least a dozen other conflicts around the world right now where you can make the same argument

Which other conflict is waged with the goal of eliminating the country completely and destroy its culture?

There were no major conflicts of this kind since WW2. Changing the government, plenty of times, but not erasing borders with the cultural genocide and some forced children "relocation" on top of that.

I didn't say anything about the US as a global empire or whatever, it's the collective World's responsibility to maintain peace and it's failing. But I say that there are clear "good guys" and "bad guys" here, regardless of the history of the US.

I see the Budapest memo referenced a lot but, obviously, it's a memo ... about ways to get rid of nukes. It's not a treaty that obligates anything at all from the United States or anyone else in terms of security support or guaranteeing Ukrainian sovereignty. I will grant, however, that the Ukrainians (and the Russians, we made promises to them in it too) probably feel pretty slighted with how history turned out in the ensuing decades.

From your link:

>>Another key point was that U.S. State Department lawyers made a distinction between "guarantee" and "assurance", referring to the security guarantees that were desired by Ukraine in exchange for non-proliferation. In the end a statement was read into the negotiation record that the (according to the U.S. lawyers) lesser sense of the English word "assurance" would be the sole implied translation for all appearances of both terms in all three language versions of the statement.

>Which other conflict is waged with the goal of eliminating the country completely and destroy its culture?

There's a lot going on in Africa and the Horn. More or less all feature some degree of genocide or mass killings, objectives of replacing the current government, or redrawing the lines on the map.

>There were no major conflicts of this kind since WW2.

This is absolutely not true. Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan (the first one), Myanmar and a couple others I'm forgetting all were an order of magnitude larger than this one in terms of casualties. Maybe you mean this is the first major conflict of this kind in Europe since WWII, in which case... maybe, because you'd have to omit Yugoslavia. There's room to argue about that one. Not sure why that's relevant, unless we're going back to the insistence about the United States' role in security on the European continent.

Problem for US and rest of NATO is that Baltic countries ARE in NATO. Once Ukraine goes Vilnus is next. Is USA ready to fight a conventional war in the Baltics? With what manpower? Germany is utterly useless right now and will be for the foreseeable future, French army is way too small same with UK. Very soon you might have to go to the Nukes..

It is much cheaper and safer to fight this war in Ukraine rather then trying to liberate Lithuania

I think what you mean to say is that "NATO is the United States, the rest of the countries are just members". That's not to knock, necessarily, the rest of the members - they've all made choices and assumptions about their own security. I agree, this is a problem, for many more reasons than the fact that only a small percentage of Americans know which country Vilnius is in, let alone where it is on a map.

>It is much cheaper and safer to fight this war in Ukraine rather then trying to liberate Lithuania

This is what I do not understand, the "safer" part. How exactly is it "safer" to intentionally antagonize the old Cold War adversary over a country that even President Obama admitted is not a strategic interest to the United States? To attempt to steelman this, we should support/arm/fund the Ukrainians as a means to degrade and destroy (by proxy) Russian combat power just in case they invade Lithuania next - or maybe to try and prevent them from being of use to the Chinese in a new Pacific War - knowing full well that they know invading a NATO country means WWIII in Europe (and probably the Pacific, who knows). This sounds awfully similar to the "we have to fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here" refrain that I heard all the time in the lead up to GWII and thereafter as we extended our stays in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it's the most compelling argument in favor of support I can come up with. I still think it's wrong, though.

Do they know that? Will Germany magically stop using Russian gas, reinstitute draft and manage to produce more than a dozen tanks a year? All the signals pre-invasion of Ukraine pointed to no. Unlike Ukraine right now Baltics CAN be taken by a surprise air mobile assault, some of those countries have 20%+ of population who subsist on healthy dose of RT and worship Putin the Tsar, they will serve as pawns we see now in Donbass.

Practically how does NATO actually liberate them. Does it have the stomach for the full scale high intensity war as we see in now in the East Ukraine? Not just Putin, I am also not sure of that. Who is going to lead the American armoured division drive to capture Kaliningrad..

Yes detoothing Russia in Ukraine is MUCH safer.

Yeah, it’s fair to question the real commitment to Article 5 that some NATO members have given their entanglement in a number of other economic engagements. I tend to think that there’s kind of a priority list of NATO members in reality that differs from what’s on paper. Germany? Absolutely. France and the UK? Of course. But Lithuania and Turkey? Poland I still think is a red line since, well, it’s been a red line since 1945 I suppose.

I don’t know that I’m as confident as you are in the Russian VDV’s ability to competently conduct an airborne invasion given their, shall we say, clumsy implementation of combined arms war in Ukraine thus war. I’d also love to see a citation that 20% (really?) of the population in the Baltics wouldn’t freakout and instead either actively support or be indifferent to a Russian invasion.

I am not certain they could, but it is not me who makes decisions, and those guys thought they could take Kyiv in 36 hours. It seems doable as paras could be reinforced much faster. The big problem is the none of those countries have depth to absorb initial attack, Ukraine's terrain is not great for the defender but at least it is a large country.

I was incorrect about the 5th column number. Lithuania is actually the best in this category with very few non-citizens. Seems like many left and some naturalized, current total is more like 8% not 33% like it was in the 90s. Latvia has the most but it is still much less than 20%.

The thing to realize is that for Latvia it is very much like Ukraine in terms of geographic distribution of ethnic Russians vs ethnic Latvians.

It's never the "same exact thing", but parallels are obvious and numerous. What more, Russia is already openly talking about some of the things they want to "reintegrate", and if you are familiar with the finer details of Russian internal politics, you can easily name a few more that aren't necessarily floated often (such as North Kazakhstan, which is "South Siberia" in irredentists' parlance).

So yes, even if you do give up on Ukraine, it won't stop there. In that, again, this is very much like 1938.

BTW, I should probably add at this point that I'm ethnically Russian as well as Russian citizen, although I've been living mostly out of the country for the past decade. But I still remember very well what our nationalists are, I'm familiar with the kind of political musings Putin gets his inspiration from, and my firm belief is that this is going to be a much bigger war than most everybody in the West currently anticipates.

I appreciate the perspective. It does conflict a bit with that of Russian friends I have here in the US, but that's probably to be expected (no one familiar with this should assume that Russians have a uniform distribution of views on politics). I'd tell you that I've walked patrols in some of the same mountains that Soviet soldiers did in Afghanistan, and have read some (but obviously not all, who can) of the material from folks that Putin takes his influence from. What I'd also tell you is that starting WWIII over Kazakhstan is not going to go over well in the United States. I don't think you were implying that, but I frankly consider that issue Russia's business and not mine, and not that of the United States.

>In that, again, this is very much like 1938.

I'm looking for some actual evidence that the global geopolitical situation is comparable to 1938. Merely pointing out that a country in Europe has been invaded is not sufficient.

At this point, I think I should probably note that I consider Putin's invasion of Ukraine to be an enormous blunder. The humanitarian cost is already well documented, but from a strategic perspective, which is the theme of this thread, he's going to deplete his forces to such a degree that any follow-on invasion of other countries is going to be even more of a disaster. I don't know why or how he was convinced this was a good idea. He was always going to pay a significant cost, even if he, eventually, gets a land bridge to Crimea.

Putin did not expect it to be a fight at all. The most damning evidence of this is that those columns that were blitzing towards Kyiv early in the war had Rosgvardia units in them, the whole purpose of which is to suppress street protests etc - and they even packed their riot gear! This is the kind of thing you do if you expect the city to fall right away, and your sole problem then is simmering dissent.

Comparison to Germany in 1930s is fairly straightforward. Both Germany and Russia believed that they have suffered considerable humiliation in the last major conflict (cold war for Russia), lost "their" lands in the process, and were plunged into an economic black hole. In both, this triggered an embrace of irredentism and the overall ideology that can be summed up as "we'll be back, and then you'll be sorry". Both produced increasingly authoritarian regimes that, as they solidified their rule, started to look more and more at "their" lands among their neighbors. Both accused one of their neighbors of persecution of "their" ethnic minority, and justified the invasion and occupation of said neighbor on those grounds.

As for WW3 - no, I don't think it'll start over Kazakhstan. But if you wait long enough, it might start over, say, Latvia. The problem is that, with every country that the collective West allows Russia to overrun, NATO Article 5 is perceived as less of a real deal and more of a bluff. Basically, if US is unwilling to fight for Ukraine for the fear of escalating into nuclear, why would it fight for e.g. Latvia when the likelihood of that escalation would be even higher? Because Latvia is a NATO member? American isolationists will say that NATO isn't worth getting nuked over anymore so than Ukraine. So if you "draw the red line" there, you might find that line rather faded by the time Russia comes close to crossing it. They might cross it simply because they don't believe you have the guts to do anything about it by then.

Adding to the problem is the overly rosy picture of Ukraine successes in this war so far. Don't get me wrong - they are doing very well, exceeding all expectations by a large margin, and have plenty to show for it. But, at the end of the day, this is still a country of 50 million people with a $6 billion defense budget (2021) fighting against a country of 150 million with a $66 billion defense budget. Ukraine has had several mobilization waves since the beginning of the war, while Russia is still relying mostly on contractors and PMC. Ukrainian industry - which is largely in the east - is already devastated, while Russian manufacturing capacity is still fully intact, limited only by sanctions. If Russia were to truly switch to war footing to the same degree that Ukraine already did, Ukrainians won't be able to hold the line - not because they're bad at it, but because Russia can afford to overwhelm them with bodies and munitions. So you can't just assume that if we sit and wait long enough, the Russian advance will stall indefinitely, and that'll solve the problem long-term because all forces will remain tied in Ukraine.

A couple things. First, I agree, as an English-only (for the most part) speaking outsider it does seem that there's a strain of irredentism that exists in Russia, and in a couple other places in Europe to be honest, that's becoming more popular. I'm not yet convinced that this means an invasion of Latvia or Lithuania is imminent, which is related to my second point.

>Putin did not expect it to be a fight at all.

I genuinely don't get this, though I agree with you. Still, how could Putin possibly expect Ukraine to roll over after the Maidan Revolution, which had clear and obvious western support? Perhaps he was nervous and figured that event was an actual threat to him? Especially given the United States', shall we say, cavalier attitude in selling arms abroad it seems really really obvious that Ukraine would of course happen to find themselves in possession of the latest in battlefield tech. Surely a lesson has been learned here, especially given that Russia's most advanced combat power has been significantly depleted in this endeavor - and without those modern weapons NATO can mop the floor with them using F-18s built in the 1990s. Same with tanks, not to mention drones.

Third,

>Because Latvia is a NATO member? American isolationists will say that NATO isn't worth getting nuked over anymore so than Ukraine.

Agree. I said this in another comment but I think it's pretty obvious that, 30+ years after the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union ceased to exist it's probably a good idea to assume there is some kind of priority list within the NATO members for who actually matters. I would venture to guess that certain former-Soviet countries that were added after the fall of Soviet Union are at the bottom.

Finally,

>Adding to the problem is the overly rosy picture of Ukraine successes in this war so far.

Also agree. When I discuss this with my too-well educated and too-well traveled friends, they sound like they've spent too much time on reddit. If you actually pay attention the war has somewhat stalemated, with slight favor to Russia at this point as they repair and rearm for what I assume will be a push to the western edge of the Donbas. Despite all this, these friends still believe in these now debunked myths (the Ghost of Kiev for one).

All of this just makes me want us to try to figure out a diplomatic solution. I don't know that Putin or Zalenskyy are in a position, politically, to seek one, so you may end up being correct that a compromise in one conflict leads, for Putin, to the initiation of another. I hope you're wrong.

I completely disagree. You can't go preemptively flattening every country you don't like (I mean, we did for a little while and all it seems to have done is made a bigger mess.)

Where did I write that you can go to preemptively flatten every country you don't like?

> But if it happens, does anyone seriously believe that US could avoid re-instituting the draft?

The US no longer has a draft law because the US determined that the draft was bad both from a military manpower perspective and from a domestic politics perspective as to maintaining national will to continue a conflict.

The US will not reauthorize a draft for an overseas war while the US remains a major power. If the US collapses from major power status and the entire political and military calculus is scrambled, it might.

>The US no longer has a draft law because the US determined that the draft was bad both from a military manpower perspective and from a domestic politics perspective as to maintaining national will to continue a conflict.

Nixon got rid of the draft for reasons that had to do with the unpopularity of the Vietnam War and his presidential election. The argument was that the AVF wouldn't negatively impact force readiness, not that the draft was "bad" from a military manpower perspective (I'm not sure what that means). There's some other reasons peppered in correspondence from that time, but I'm super skeptical of this argument for enough reasons to finish a PhD thesis. It's been a long time coming, but the conversation needs to be had about how even if the United States needed to institute a draft we may not actually be able to do so anymore because of the general decline in health and fitness of men in this country. More over, there are civ-mil relations considerations that aren't properly accounted for when you claim the AVF is superior - we have essentially a warrior caste now, that's in many ways sectioned off from the reset of the civilian population. Good? Bad? Exercise for the reader but you can probably guess my stance.

>The US will not reauthorize a draft for an overseas war while the US remains a major power.

I don't see how these are related. Plenty of non "major" powers have conscription (in some form or another), as do plenty of "major" powers. The US wasn't a "major" power before WWI, though it was certainly "a power", and yet my great grandfather was drafted. Maybe you mean the US won't get into an unwinnable and unpopular ground war in South East Asia and then re-institute the draft, but you may be underestimating the depth of ineptitude of the people who've been running the show the last 30ish years. Everyone I served with was a volunteer, obviously, but war necessitates a lot of things that people would otherwise consider impossible right up until they happen.

> The argument was that the AVF wouldn't negatively impact force readiness, not that the draft was "bad" from a military manpower perspective

The argument for the AVF has evolved over time; the issue wasn't once and done, and the importance of longer service terms in a wide range of specialties has been increasingly cited in arguments for maintaining the AVF. But even in the original Gates Commission report, the AVF was not, contrary to your description, painted as merely non-harmful, but as a more efficient means of meeting military requirements, with extensive supporting analysis.

That's a really charitable description. There was enormous political pressure in 1968 to find a way to end the draft since Nixon promised in the campaign that he would do it. When you tell people to go find ways to do it, especially when you're the President, they're going to find ways. The entire premise of the AVF at the time was that it would work fine, if you could still do a draft if you needed to.

The Commission's charter wasn't "figure out how to never do a draft again". It was "figure out how to turn this draft that everyone hates off".

edit: bad grammar

> That's a really charitable description.

No, it's just accurate to what's in the report.

> The entire premise of the AVF at the time was that it would work fine, if you could still do a draft if you needed to.

No, it wasn't. While the standby draft was in the report as a safeguard to slightly reduce the the from-0 spinup time of a draft, the argument presented is not “an AVF is non-harmful as long as backstopped by a standby draft”, but “the AVF is superior on both practical economic efficiency grounds and ethical respect for personal liberty grounds in essentially every conceivable situation (with extensive analysis of the former and philosophical argument for the latter), and, just in case, we can also set up a standby draft system so things aren't quite needing to be built from scratch if Congress and the President ever decide a draft is needed for some reason again.”

In fact, the section of the Gates Commission report on the Standby Draft makes, obliquely, very good argument against the standby draft ever being the right choice, pointing out that it cannot immediately produce forces in an emergency because of time to train and organize, so it is only useful for gradual expansion, but then arguing for voluntary recruitment measures like compensation boosts for gradual expansion to be used in preference to activating the standby draft.

Again. I'm not contesting that these arguments exist and were in the report from back in 1968. (I'm going to ignore for a second that we don't actually do anything to rehearse a draft, standby or not, so yes we actually would have to build everything from scratch again.) I'm stating that there is no way the political direction from the White House to end the draft didn't influence what ended up happening, who got to write it, and what was in it. That does not detract from the arguments that you may find compelling, and that's fine. To your example, that we can just boost compensation to make up for not having conscription. How exactly do you do that if, say, you need an army of engineers to staff cyber warfare operations? Pay them $500k to put on a uniform, hoping that $500k is the "market clearing price" where someone decides "okay fine I'll quit my FANG job and go to war"? At some point the AVF starts looking like a contract Army, and not a functioning part of a republic, let alone an actual state military. The AVF is a libertarian dream, I'll grant you that, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's longer term effects haven't been bad and it couldn't use a rethink.

The usual approach is to delegate the most complex technical work to defense contractors who can pay market rates (or close enough) to civilian employees.

The military doesn't even want conscripts anymore. They have discipline problems, take too long to train, and don't stay long enough. Conscription stopped being relevant when technology became more important than numbers.

Perhaps I really should just pull up my notes from college and when I was in, but I am very much unconvinced by the arguments that take the form of "the free market solves this military staffing problem and technology made the draft obsolete, so whatever". I realize that what you're saying is more nuanced than that, but after witnessing how contractors behaved in Afghanistan I'll just say I'm not convinced of their competence, let alone their actual commitment to the job.

I am not, necessarily, concerned about questions of if the military wants conscripts. I'm concerned about the ability of the nation-state to properly respond to a crisis that precipitates major war. If you just consider the military's wants in a static context and extrapolate forward, just giving them what they want, the entire procurement roadmap for the next 10 years would probably still look like IED defeat devices and other garbage "future" tech that didn't and doesn't work, with the actually useful stuff arriving in 2040. We've thankfully had, on rare occasions, some smart civilians and DoD contrarians who have edged things in a different direction in some cases.

>Conscription stopped being relevant when technology became more important than numbers.

Hard, hard disagree. It is not at all decided that technology is more important than "numbers" (I'm assuming you are referring to raw numbers of troops in a particular combat zone). "Technology" has a lead time, and while humans have an approximate lead time of ~18 years, whatever technology that would beat them on the battlefield isn't stockpiled like humans are.

None of that matters. If there's a major war with, let's say China, it's all going to be over one way or another before any conscripts could be drafted and trained to a useful level. And even if they could be trained, there aren't enough stockpiles of advanced weapons systems for them to use.

The premise here is that a major war would automatically escalate into nuclear right away. That premise is disputed by many, however.

I think it's pretty unlikely that a war between nuclear powers would last long enough for a draft to become relevant. And if it somehow did, I'm not at all convinced that the US public would opt for sustained war over giving them whatever it is they want.

A draft takes a long time to ramp up, and soldiers take a lot of time to train, so we're unlikely to start up a draft unless we expect a conflict to be protracted. The United States is unlikely to invade China and vice versa. A war pitting the US against China is likely to be largely naval- and air-oriented, with ground action (if any) concentrated on Taiwan, and will probably take at most a few weeks or months.

We mustn't forget Vizzini's Aphorism: Never get involved in a land war in Asia.

If only all the wars that were deemed "unlikely" before they began never happened, we'd all be much better off.

The problem is that once shots are fired, things can escalate very quickly, and decision-making is often not rational.

A full out war between nuclear powers would be over way faster than a draft could be implemented.