It is very dangerous, since it will mean that an organization with enough drones can dominate society on its own. Much better if humans were battlefield-relevant.

And if you look at Russia your logic does fail on that example - no amount of human losses affect Russia's behavior in the current war as they are sure that Ukraine will run out of soldiers before Russia does. So, from Russia's POV the faster the grinder the sooner their victory.

Here in Sweden we instituted mandatory military service we did so because we wanted to ensure that there was no military class that if they decide to can take over. We knew the cost, and the cost is worth it.

In normal times the cost is simply to do ones mandatory military service.

This protects against coups, ensures your power in society and prevents groups of officers and soldiers etc. from taking over.

In actual coups, it's often a small cadre of well-connected higher officers who do the work. It's not the whole military. By the time the whole military (or country) realises what's happened, it's already happened and there's not a lot they can do.

Meanwhile Spain suffered an attempted coup in 1981 [0] while mandatory military service was still in place [1]. The conscripts did not play a role in protecting democracy.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Spanish_coup_attempt

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Service_(Spain)

And there is a very real economic cost to mandatory military service. It only makes sense in the context of a small country (in terms of population) bordering a large aggressive neighbor, such as Finland or (possibly) Canada.

Artillery and tanks will have some kind of professional officer though.

In both cases I very much doubt that people lacking the training, organisation and weaponry of the professional military will be able to beat them in contemporary circumstances.

I realise military service means people have some training, but as much as the professionals? What about air cover, heavy weaponry, communications? What about timing - a coup might be over before conscripts can react.

Most of all, is there historical evidence this works?

They can at least shoot machine guns and carbines, use artillery etc. Even elite units such as jaeger troops/commandos are ordinary people, not necessarily people who stay for longer than their military service.

Large, permanent, professional internal and external security forces were not something the framers of the Constitution trusted, and the Second Amendment was, as much as anything, a way to reduce the temptation to rely on those instead of summoning a posse (for law enforcement) or conscription (for war, when necessary), rather than a way to prevent conscription.

They ultimately failed at that, too, though.

> were not something the framers of the Constitution trusted

If you follow the reasoning through those two claims appear to be at odds. That said I think there's plenty of evidence that your first claim is false depending on how you define the particulars of "deny the state".

No, the claim that the purpose of the second amendment was to assure that the state could rely on a citizen militia for internal and external security instead of denying them that ability and forcing them to rely on professional forces is not at all at odds with the claim that large professional internal and external security forces were not something that the framers trusted.

Your excerpting a verb phrases from each of the two claims to claim a conflict while ignoring the rest of the claims may suggest the source of your misreading -- because you seen to think that the thing that I said that the 2A was not meant to deny the states was the same thing the framers didn't trust, rather than something that was an alternative to it.

However in context it seems wrong because regardless of intent one of the effects of an armed populace is that a sufficiently unpopular conscription is going to carry serious physical risks for those in power. With regards to the framers I'd expect such a scenario to be classified as government tyranny and marked NOTABUG.

I'd suggest that the answer to the person you responded to is that the conscriptions that happened in the US weren't sufficiently unpopular to motivate such drastic measures.

Generally such conscripts realize they're dooming their family to at best prison and at worst dying in the raid on their home.

This is the first I hear that this would be the motivation.

The main motivation is that for a small country like Sweden to have enough manpower to defend itself adequately, conscription is necessary.

So you get desertion, refusal to enlist, rapid surrender, and so on. This results in the losing state having to resort to ever more brutal means of conscription such as literally dragging people in off the street, making it illegal to film such actions, making it illegal to leave the country, expanding the age range for conscription, and so on.

That all results in even worse morale which makes your fundamental problems even worse. That, in turn, can motivate the losing nation to expend soldiers/resources on missions which may have some propaganda benefit, but ultimately serve no military purpose whatsoever. And at some point it all just collapses like a house of cards.

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And I think this fundamental issue of morale will be a perpetual in war. The winner will not be decided by who has the most drones, but by which side's morale breaks first. This is why Afghanistan, in terms of outcomes, is essentially the strongest military nation in the world. They've defeated both the US and the USSR in spite of being orders of magnitude behind in every single measure of military strength - except for morale. Those guys' spirit is simply unbreakable and they will fight you for decades, and to the last man, with absolutely no relenting.

The problem is, in Afghanistan the Western nations didn't do much else than depose the Taliban that took around two years and provide education abilities for women afterwards. But in order to actually achieve change, you have to invest significantly more resources to actually build the foundations for a viable society: democracy, rule of law and an economic perspective for the populace.

In Germany, the Allied Forces stayed for about 45 years, two generations worth of time. Just think of the massive amount of money and resources invested... the first years were taken similarly to Afghanistan - depose the Hxtler regime and rebuild a rule of law afterwards and, as in the Luftbrücke, ensure basic survival. But then, they stayed in for over three decades to make sure that a healthy democracy would not just form but also establish and entrench itself against threats, and that Germany had an industrial base which was used to provide employment and income for the populace. Also, thank God for the Americans deciding not to follow the "Morgenthau plan" that proposed turning Germany into a purely agrarian state with no industrial capability ever again - that would have caused us to follow down the Afghanistan path with utter certainty.

In Afghanistan however, the situation after the immediate war and short post-war period was markedly different. The troops were locked up in their bases outside of bombing jihadists, which meant that local warlords had little to no oversight in their atrocities and stuff like "bacha bazi" (organized child sexual abuse) and slavery went on with effective impunity. The local puppet government barely had any income sources other than foreign aid (and selling opium on the black market) which meant there was no way to form a national identity and storytelling or even a common purpose, and a lack of oversight of the occupying forces over the puppet government led to widespread corruption and looting of the external investments, which led to it losing support across the country. And on top of that, we didn't even do decent oversight over our own troops. Abu Ghuraib is far from the only scandal that was barely prosecuted, not to mention all the other shit that was quietly swept under the rug - that led to the populace despising our troops even more.

We didn't lose Afghanistan because the Taliban are a strong army - they were and are not, just look at the videos from right after the takeover. We lost Afghanistan because we didn't give anyone in the wide population a reason to fight for themselves and not just submit to the next best warlord.

All of the things you're discussing are not things that the US simply didn't bother to try to solve, but we were ultimately powerless to do so. Americans would never tolerate US soldiers dying by the tens to hundreds of thousands as would have happened if we actually tried to enforce order on foot. So we were left with proxy soldiers, contractors, and a money printing machine. But that simply wasn't enough to defeat the Taliban, let alone carry out the grand changes you mention.

I disagree with this assessment.

Had the Western forces provided actual, proven economic opportunities for the people, the supply of "resistance" fighters would have dwindled. People don't become terrorists or insurgents just because, they follow that path because they do not see a gainful alternative to this life. (Side note, we're seeing this also in Palestine where Hamas and Fatah both draw a steady supply of recruits from the desperate)

Afghanistan has untold billions of dollars worth of all kinds of natural resources [1]. But no attempt was made, not even on paper, to exploit these natural resources. IMHO, even a single pilot project would have been a good start - a mine that pays a decent amount of money to the workers and the profits going to the national government as well as local authorities. Basically, show to the wide population that something good came around from all the suffering in the end, provide an alternative from the Taliban propaganda that at least promised salvation in the afterlife for killing infidels.

But no, we ignored this opportunity, which meant that other than "women can go to schools" we did not have any talking points available to counter the Taliban propaganda of "they're killing us with impunity and the puppet government is looting". That is how we truly lost, and what China and a bunch of oil sheiks will now enjoy.

[1] https://globalinitiative.net/analysis/why-is-afghanistan-par...

Germany used to be the same until 1871, a loose federation of fiefdoms that regularly went to war amongst each other. Fun fact, the tariff region structure [1] very much resembles a map from what was "Germany" before then [2].

It's not impossible to turn a bunch of small fiefdoms into one powerful entity. All you need is a compelling story and, as I wrote in this thread, some sort of economic incentive/perspective that actually shows to the population that the new government is actually better for their individual lives than what was before.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/de/comments/c18q0r/das_heilige_tari...

[2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Heiliges_R%C3%B6misches_...

The Soviets wanted Afghanistan for imperialist reasons, during the first Taliban era there were enough other sources that were more convenient, the Americans lacked the conviction and coherence to follow through... and now the Chinese are swooping in with money.

So yeah as morale collapses you're left expanding the age of conscription, which further collapses morale. There were plenty of sardonic jokes about the Volkssturm, 'the people's brigade.' Why is the Volkssturm the state's most valuable resource? Because they have silver in their hair, gold in their teeth, and lead in their bones.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Befehlsnotstand#Nazi_Germany

Battlefields have the inconvenient property of sometimes coming to where you are. Even if you would rather not participate in any way.

Currently in democratic countries one of the brakes on war is that you need "boots" on the ground, and "boots" on the ground results in caskets draped in flags on TV. Which result in people not voting for you come next election. If you don't need humans to fight on the ground anymore (or you can get away with drastically fewer humans on the battlefield) then you will get a lot more war, and a lot more battlefields in a lot more places.

That's the problem. First order effect is of course good for the humans who don't need to die on the battlefield to achieve some goals. Second order effect is what I'm worried about. The lot more suffering caused by a lot more wars and battlefields in a less stable world.

And that is assuming you need the resources of a state to fight these autonomous wars. If the tech is cheap enough, and hard to "control" enough that it is available for organised crime you might see it used in assassinations, gang warfare, and protection rackets. And then we all will live on battlefields. Third order effects are the people hurt by the anti-drone weapons missing their target or activating the wrong time. Fourth order effects are all the constraints and weird technology restrictions they will put on tech trying to stop the proliferation of autonomous drones.

I'm still concerned about the worst case scenario there being Microsoft getting their trusted computing wet dream. However I'm hopeful that it ends up being nothing more than embedded microscopic serial numbers in anything resembling a microcontroller, ID requirements to place purchases, and legal requirements for disposal (no more garage sale electronics).

The other scenario that I think might be more likely is radar and video surveillance covering every inch of every city and a related domestic agency capable of fielding rapid, tightly targeted anti-aircraft measures on a large scale.

I agree with your other points, but this only helps with (physically) extending the battlefield, at least going by the current war in Ukraine. It's not only the line of contact that is now part of the battlefield, there's also a band of 10-15 kilometres (if not more) on each side which is now part of the active battlefield because of the use of drones.

Even though I have to admit that it looks like the very big power asymmetry in favour of cheap drones over almost everything that moves down bellow (from mere soldiers on foot to armoured vehicles) has helped with actually decreasing the number of total casualties (just one of the many paradoxes of war), as it is now way too risky to get out in the open so soldiers do it way less compared with the pre-drone era.

Drones don't remove people from the battlefield, they further the trend of there being no boundary to "the battlefield", putting everyone on it.

They can, depending on how they are employed, reduce the casualties (total and particularly civilian) on both sides of a conflict for any degree of military impact (Ukraine's recent strike against Russian bombers is an example), or they can increase the civilian death toll for marginal military impact (the accounts of Israeli gun- and missile-armed drones directly targeting civilians in Gaza being an example of what that could look like.)

Thus indeed, this made the battlefield larger instead, now common trucks, warehouses and shipping containers are legitimate targets.

What Ukraine destroyed doesn't help either, for example they destroyed early warning airplanes intended to warn Russia if incoming missiles are nuclear or not. How Russia have to assume incoming missiles are nuclear, specially if they are flying in the regions where their land nuke detectors were destroyed too (I think 1 or 2 years ago Ukraine did that).

Thus Ukraine proved, that civilian equipment can destroy nuclear deterrence. Now common trucks and containers are a threat as big as many advanced military hardware out there. A truck with a bunch of drones can open a hole in your nuclear defense as much as stealth planes were needed for this before.

yes, that is the point i've been making for a while - those cheap automated systems, the drones being the first examples of it, is the new MAD/equalizer weapons now available to all countries, not only to the large nuclear ones (and that becomes very important for avoiding future wars giving for example growing doubt that NATO, and USA in particular, would come to the defense of Baltic countries, whereis several millions of drones (including larger long range ones) which Baltic countries can get relatively easy for several billions of dollars may pose an unacceptable high cost to Russia of any potential aggression against those countries).

In this particular case a much smaller Ukraine can use that MAD/equalizer potential to win the war, or at least to get a great negotiating position by systematically severely degrading Russia's strategic capabilities toward making Russia potentially defenseless against US or China, or even say Turkey.

That is how i think they can degrade strategic air/missile defense systems https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42529638

And imagine if similarly to the plane attack Ukraine would attack Russian nuclear submarines parked openly at the bases (say using ships for drone launching instead of trucks) - there is no risk of destruction of those submarines, yet 10-50kg drone can damage the skin and outer hull forcing the submarine out of service for prolonged time.

You're mistaking the removal of certain soldiers for "removing people". There will absolutely be people in future battle fields, mainly civilians, or as we call them now, terrorists.

Off the shelf parts are available for 200mph quads (that’s without payload though)