Middle-range strike drones are much cheaper than JDAMs (smaller payload, but you don't care about that against trucks), longer range, and let you operate in fully contested airspace or even when the enemy has air superiority.

Aerial bombs are for entirely different purposes; they're for destroying fortified positions. Whether the aircraft should be manned or not is an entirely separate question, but one thing is unambiguous, it needs to be big enough to carry said bomb (aerial bombs are very heavy).

But again, complete overkill for a transport vehicle.

Re, the terrain of Donbas: compare, at the same zoom level:

Donbas

To a stereotypically flat place in the US, like, say:

Kansas

Unless you mean the "Smoky Hills" of Kansas:

Smoky Hills

Though their relief is only about 2/3rds that of that in Donbas. Donbas's relief is more like that of the Piedmont Province (the area west of the Appalachians), the dissected till-plains of southern Iowa / northern Missouri, the Tennessee / Kentucky western highland rim, or the low glaciated plateaus of the northeastern US (NE. Pennsylvania to southern NY).

It's not as forested as it used to be, but still has sizable patches left, such as along the Siversky Donetsk, mainly pine. Maybe the area east of the Appalachians would be a good reference for the mix of farmland with residual forest patches (well more than midwest states like e.g. Kansas). Defensive lines are commonly built in the forested areas, for greater cover.

Oh, and also (re: NERA) worth noting that there would be a brief boost in energy transfer to the generated gas from cell discharge. You wouldn't come close to fully discharging a cell (that requires lithium diffusion), but it can effectively instantaneously discharge the double-layer capacitance at the electrode-electrolyte interfaces, and very rapidly oxidize lithium at the anode surface (such as the SEI) / reduce species at the cathode. So in a way, not an entirely non-reactive armour, and somewhat reminiscent of the reactive-but-not-explosive NERA variants where they mix nitrate salts into the elastomer to make the reaction more energetic and gas-generating.

It seems that the most effective "drone defense" thusfar has been "moving in small groups or individually, at night or in bad weather, and then hiding in a basement until there's enough people / supplies to push further".

It's clear that armoured vehicle design needs to change. But hangar/turtle tanks hardly seem a durable approach either (even in Ukraine their use has fallen off). I'm still very much a believer in hybrid armoured vehicles, where you have a battery pack with several dozen km of range, and one or more generators powering it.

From a direct survivability perspective, if you use a non-flammable li-ion chemistry (there are plenty, it just means sacrificing some energy density - still requires managed venting / air control systems, however) and have cells in parallel connected by multiple busses, spread out across the vehicle's footprint, it becomes almost impossible to take out the entire power supply, just individual cells. Likewise, since electric motors are compact, you can have 1-2 motors on each axle, and again it becomes almost impossible for a drone to get a mobility kill that way (reducing approaches only to trying to disable the tracks themselves). If they take out the generator/generators, the vehicle still has its electric power to fall back on, and while it's not going to be making some deep push anymore, it can still keep fighting, and retreat when needed.

From an indirect survivability perspective, you have the ability to advance silently when needed (no engine noise, greatly reduced thermal signature), and since modern batteries have so much power density, you have the ability to have a higher top speed, which has proven critical for safety in drone-dense environments. You also have a lot of electrical power, for drone-detecting radars, drone jammers, anti-drone weaponry (lasers, microwave, etc), and so forth.

The mass and volume of the battery pack (we're talking maybe ~250kWh for a rugged heavy armoured offroad tracked vehicle, ~60kWh that for a lighter-armoured road-optimized vehicle) isn't wasted. Cell cans are steel, and between the inner plate and outer armour you're basically forming a honeycomb structure (good for dissipating shocks and spray) with a lot of thermal capacity (cells are organics, e.g. generally high specific heats). With a proper design, you might even be able to get it to function as non-explosive reactive armour. Specifically, contrary to misconceptions that NERA requires elasticity, NERA works instead by a vapor pressure-bulging effect: the interlayer vaporizes and expands violently outward, causing bending of the metal plates it's sandwiched between, so the incoming metal jet is constantly hitting a different location as the bending progresses. NERA normally uses, but does not in any way require, elastomers for this role, simply because they're easiest to package between metal layers, but a properly engineered battery pack should be able to serve the same role. In NERA, you want as much gas pressure generated as rapidly as possible; the copper plasma jet effectively instantly converts e.g. ethylene carbonate, graphite, etc to gaseous CO2, H2O, etc (plus vaporized metals along with the vaporized steel). The keys that matters are that cells that (A) cells that are in parallel are distributed throughout the footprint of the vehicle (not concentrated in a single location), (B) shared buses create multiple distinct parallel paths between the cells within a given parallel group, and to the next series group; and (C) (required for any NERA) that generated gases are properly vented / handled.

A number of next-generation armoured vehicle designs are pursuing hybrid propulsion.

. I believe the record for most FPV drone hits survived by a single tank in Ukraine is now thirty-two,

The value of 32 small FPV drones is way less than the value of one tank. And in general you're likely to be talking about "hangar tanks" / "turtle tanks" when talking about things like that, but these take on *massive* disadvantages, including being extremely visible and easily targeted by larger drones or artillery (as well as bogging down easily, difficulty getting through confined areas, poor or no gun maneuverability, etc).

it's mostly flat and open.

Donbas is mostly rolling hills, much of it forested. And much of the combat has been in urban environments, which is about as complex terrain as you can get.

cheap FPV drones don't work if the other guy is on the far side the hill you're hiding behind, for example.

Uh, yes they do? They literally fly.

Small drones are munitions, and need to be thought of as that. Even non-FPV drones generally have quite short lifespans - for the smallest categories, just a few missions before they're shot down, jammed, or otherwise crash. They need to be stockpiled the same way you'd stockpile grenades or artillery shells (with the caveat that you'll have a much faster upgrade cycle on the electronics, and need to enable that). It also means short-cycle-life secondary cells, or even primary cells, as the power supply. E.g., with current tech, lithium metal or lithium sulfur are good candidates.

Middle-range strikes are increasingly proving invaluable as well in Ukraine this year. The ability to affordably take out a fuel or ammunition truck dozens of kilometers behind the front line is key.

It doesn't have to be the way it is, guys. You genuinely can just fix all of the things that are wrong in your system. But the first step is understanding that said things can be a lot better, and are elsewhere.

And I want to be clear, this isn't an "everything in or about the US is wrong" post**. This is about "US infrastructure in general" - the focus being on digital infrastructure, but arguably, it applies to physical infrastructure as well (the US is a laggard on high-speed internet, its electrical grid is famously unreliable, US high speed rail projects have been one disaster after the next, etc etc).

** If you want me to sandwich in a "US thing done right" as a counterpoint: the EU is politically dysfunctional, with any one state being able to veto collective action, allowing rivals to pick us apart one at a time. We have no common defense. Also, each state sets its own contrasting economic policies, yet all are on the same currency, so each one can drag the other down. I want to be clear, this isn't an "everything is perfect in the EU and everything is wrong in the US" post, the EU very much has its own problems! This is a post very specifically about US infrastructure compared to the rest of the world - and it's not simply a problem of funding. It's a problem of the US just running off with incompatible siloed system with hack patches tying them together and never putting forth any meaningful effort to fix things, with most people not even aware that you can do things better, and that most countries do.

US prescriptions are still sent to individual pharmacies. There is no nationwide system where any pharmacy can just look up the prescription of anyone who just walks in, right when they walk in, instantly after the person walks out of the doctor's office

And there is absolutely no need for "24 hours". The medications are all on shelves in the back. All they have to do is grab them and put them in a bag. We're not talking about compounding pharmacies here.

Indeed. And, yes, Claude massively over-comments. I have more Claude coding rules about commenting than any other single topic. Though I do wonder if my rules make as much sense in the AI era as when code was all maintained by humans. Most of my rules are about minimizing comments because comments are fragile and tend to get out of date... but Claude actually does do a pretty good job of maintaining the comments. I still try to minimize them, though.

Heh. That's definitely true for me as well, now, not so much in the past. When I was at Google I had a higher caliber of colleagues. My colleagues at the new company are bright, but they're young and inexperienced. But, yeah, if I didn't have Claude to kick ideas around with me in my current position, my code would be much worse than it is.

Nope. Wars used to regularly cause widespread famines, as well as being far more directly bloody. Murdering all the children was for millennia an accepted practice. You should read the book.

Yes, it is

When the norms and the expectations move from considering something cruelty to be funny or enjoyable to merely accepted and then to shameful or hidden -- and even illegal -- those steps are progress.

Related: "Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue." While the individual hypocrite may not be better than the person who engages in open vice, and might be worse, the fact that people feel the need to keep their vices secret is a positive indication about society as a whole. Assuming, of course, that the "vice" is actually bad.

That's another area where our society has been improved... we're more tolerant, having realized that many things we considered bad are merely different. We still have progress to make on that front, too, but don't let perfect be the enemy of progress.

That's probably true of many, and it couples well with motivated-disbelief. Confidence that if it happens it won't really be a problem for you makes it easier to just shrug the whole thing off and refuse to think too much about whether your disbelief makes sense.

It's worth mentioning that there's one more position that actually does make sense, even if it's a bit Pollyanna-ish: The belief that science will find a less impactful way to address the problem in the future. The argument is that we shouldn't trouble ourselves now, we should just wait for the new tech that will fix it.

I actually subscribe to a weak form of this view. I think we should be acting now to address climate change, but that we shouldn't do anything too drastic, because technology is going to improve and find better solutions. The world is actually making significant strides toward emissions reduction, mostly in the form of low-emissions electricity production, and not because of a moral obligation but because renewables are cheap! That's the sort of thing that generates real progress, without much pain.

I suspect that atmospheric carbon recapture will always be extremely energy-intensive, but we are on a path to extreme but intermittent energy abundance, and carbon recapture sounds like a great way to spend the extra terawatts when they're available. I think one of the things we're not doing enough of now is research into carbon recapture and sequestration. Reducing emissions can never get us to net-negative CO2, and we need that if we want to actually fix this problem in anything less than a millennium, so cutting emissions is insufficient. The corollary to that is that cutting emissions will likely become unnecessary before we get very close to zero.

So, the conclusion of the weak-form of this techno-optimisim is that we should be working to curb emissions, and we should be directing tax dollars to recapture and sequestration research (and geoengineering, too), but we shouldn't go so far that we reduce economic output.

What I'd really like to see us do is to take a very market-driven approach, facilitated by carbon taxes. Pick a reasonable per-ton price and apply it at the point of extraction, where it's easy to identify and track, so that every downstream use has the carbon tax built in. Fossil fuel consumption that doesn't burn it and release the CO2 can apply for a rebate to recover the carbon taxes on the carbon they didn't emit. Couple that with carbon tariffs which attempt to impute to foreign-made goods the CO2 emitted in their production. Anyone who can prove they're capturing and permanently sequestering tons of carbon should be able to capture that as a refundable tax credit. Planting trees should count, as long as there's a plan to keep that carbon sequestered for several hundred years -- and if the trees burn, the tax liability comes back. Oh, and a small percentage of the tax revenue should be earmarked for climate mitigation research. The rest can just go into the general fund, ideally displacing other taxes, and maybe funding progressive offsets since a carbon tax would be mildly regressive.

There'd be a fair amount of bureaucracy in defining and administering such a tax, especially the tariff part. But it's manageable, I think, in particular because it doesn't have to be perfect, it only has to be good enough that everyone is incentivized to avoid 1-2% of their emissions this year, another 1-2% next year, and so on, and good enough that there's actual money to be made in recapture and sequestration for anyone who can figure it out. With that, we can sit back and let the market solve the sort of problem it's good at solving. We might need to tune the carbon tax rates a bit from time to time, and we'll want to scrutinize the system regularly to identify loopholes to close, but mostly we could just consider it a solution in progress.

And it's also worth remembering that we wage far less war than ever before, and engage in far less of the rest as well. Stephen Pinker's "The Better Angels of Our Nature" documents this very well and I highly recommend it.

Just consider one example: Animal cruelty. Of course some people are still quite cruel to animals, but they're the exception, and this was not historically the case. For example there are historical accounts of a common festival entertainment in medieval France, where cats were put in sacks or baskets or hung from poles and burned alive so their yowling could amuse crowds of festival-goers. Bear-baiting, bull-baiting and cockfighting were other examples. These weren't underground, deviant activities, they were public, family events that whole communities anticipated and attended with great enjoyment.

We're far from perfect, but we're getting better, and not just technologically.

I think that imputes too much evil to them, and not enough stupidity. Apply Hanlon's Razor "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".

No, I think the truth is that they think the catastrophe will be good, or they don't believe it. Or both! Humans are very good at cognitive dissonance.

Among the more deeply religious on the right, I think many may accept that climate change is real, but assume that the end will come first -- or even that climate change is the predicted Armageddon that will cleanse the Earth by fire and be associated with the Second Coming of Christ. Among those with the latter view are some would actually like to accelerate the process, because Second Coming is a good thing for the faithful; it ends their struggles and sends them to a life of eternal glory.

Among those who aren't so religious, I think it's mostly motivated reasoning. Having to make large changes in order to prevent a catastrophe is unpleasant, and to some extent it seems crazy to think that puny humans could seriously affect the planet, so it's easier to believe that the climate scientists are wrong, that either climate change isn't happening, or that it won't really be so bad, or that we can't do anything about it anyway. This creates the question of why climate scientists would continue being so vociferously wrong, which leads to a belief that they must be maliciously wrong (the right also needs to apply Hanlon's Razor).

I seriously doubt that anyone is doing a Mr. Burns, rubbing their hands in glee while planning a catastrophe they think they can come out on top of. First, because anyone in a position to do that is already on top, and second because being top dog in a hellish dystopia isn't really a big win.

Did you ever notice it's the complete pussies that post as AC?